


Happy Birthday

by MaxStef



Category: Original Work
Genre: Coming of Age, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Hawaiian Folklore, Parenthood, Recovery, TW: Misgendering, This is not a "pro-life" story please don't take it that way, Trans Character, Transitioning, mainly memories of it though, tw: childbirth, tw: parental abuse, tw: pregnancy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-20
Updated: 2019-08-20
Packaged: 2020-09-19 14:23:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20320246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaxStef/pseuds/MaxStef
Summary: "On Kealoha’s birth-day, her father sat alone on a train from Boston, sleeping soundly with his head against the window.He had tried his best to stay awake, he really had, but it was only a matter of time before his aching body got the better of him, and now as the conductor made his way through the car, ever drawing nearer, this stretch of his journey grew closer to its end.But pity can be a boy’s greatest asset, and when a boy looked like him, young and frightened and pregnant near to bursting, pity was not hard to come by."OR, how Kaleo survived through pregnancy, and thrived in fatherhood... eventually





	1. 2003

**Author's Note:**

> This is basically just a backstory thing I wrote for a character that kind of got out of hand lol

On Kealoha’s birth-day, her father sat alone on a train from Boston, sleeping soundly with his head against the window.  
He had tried his best to stay awake, he really had, but it was only a matter of time before his aching body got the better of him, and now as the conductor made his way through the car, ever drawing nearer, this stretch of his journey grew closer to its end.  
It wasn’t long before the man reached his seat, tapping on his shoulder to wake him, and asking for a ticket he did not have.  
But pity can be a boy’s greatest asset, and when a boy looked like him, young and frightened and pregnant near to bursting, pity was not hard to come by.  
The conductor took pity, and spoke kindly, “Young lady” -a common mistake- “do you need help?”  
He shook his head; “help” came with police, finding his name and calling his parents, checking another face off their missing children list as they dragged him back screaming to the home he had fled. He did not want “help.”  
“Well I can’t let you ride the train without a ticket,” the conductor said.  
“I’m sorry.”  
His voice was hoarse, and he realized he hadn’t spoken in a very long time.  
“I really should call the police,” continued the man.  
“Please don’t.” He didn’t want to cry in front of a stranger. “Please.”  
The man looked around like one might when they are thinking very hard, and then leaned in close, lowering his voice.  
“What’s your name?”  
“Glenn,” said Kaleo. No stranger could be trusted with the real one.  
“Are you in trouble, Glenn?”  
“I’m just trying to get to my aunts house,” he lied, “I don’t have any money, I couldn’t call her, I’m sorry.”  
Of course, he had no aunts. And if he did they certainly wouldn’t live in- where were they, anyway? New Hampshire? Rhode Island? Wherever he was, he would never have relatives here, at least not ones that knew him, and that was the point. He was running, after all, and New England was the farthest from California, nevermind Hawai’i, that a boy could hope to get short of leaving the country, and he didn’t have a passport.  
“How old are you?”  
Seventeen, barely, though he feared he looked younger.  
“Eighteen.”  
A skeptical kind of look passed over the man’s eyes, but he did not press further.  
“The next stop is Portland,” he said, “if I give you money to call her, do you think your aunt could pick you up there?”  
Kaleo nodded, uncertainly. Such an easy out must come with a catch.  
“I’ll make sure someone keeps an eye on you until she comes; you’ll be alright.”  
There it was, disguised as protection. But it’s not as if he had a choice.  
“Thank you,” he said, trying his best to show only the half of himself that was grateful, and not the half that shivered with dread.  
The man moved on down the car, watching him still out the corner of his eye though there really was no point. He wasn’t stupid enough to run away now, on a moving train. He would wait until Portland, until the train left the station and the guard glanced in the other direction. He was good at slipping away by now, he could make it.  
After that he supposed he'd have to figure it out, like he always did.  
And there was that pain again, like period cramps, or the false labor he'd suffered through before, like the baby was pulling him in. But he'd been counting the weeks and he had three more at least, so he would not be tricked to panic like last time.  
“Winona, shut up,” he muttered to the baby, with this name he'd been calling it since the bump began to show, taken from the Arizona village he'd been stopped in the day he found out it was in there.  
And he didn't want it. And the longer he was stuck with it the angrier he got.  
If only stupid Koa hadn't opened his stupid pretty mouth, seen him through his stupid pretty eyes as no one else had, as a boy, and someone worthy of love. If only he hadn't been so lonely for that to be enough.  
This was all his own fault, for falling so easily, for being too scared to buy condoms, for running when he did, for not being old enough for the abortion, and then for being incapable of affording it, and then for waiting too long, and now he was going to die alone on the side of the road while Winona cried between his knees and drowned in his blood, which was why he kept a wallet in his bra for his student ID and his makeshift will.  
“Bury me as Kaleo,” it said. “Tell them I am a man, and my baby is Winona. And burn my body on a pyre.” He liked the idea of going up in flames.  
But he still had three more weeks to live, so Winona had no right bothering him yet.  
And the train pulled into Portland.  
“C’mon,” the conductor said, and led Kaleo onto the platform.  
Outside the breeze hit him like a stranger, cold and misty, nothing like the warm humidity of the home he’d left, and he held himself tight, willing his hoodie to be warmer, to swallow him up.  
He followed the man into the station, which looked like every other station, and took the change he gave him for the payphone across the room. As he walked toward it the man approached the woman at the desk, and Kaleo took care to listen to their conversation there.  
“I think she's a minor,” the man was saying, in hushed tones, “she says she's calling her aunt but keep an eye on her; don't let her run off. If no one comes to get her you should probably call the police.”  
So that was it. He was a prisoner.  
He flipped through names in his mind as he reached the phone, wondering if there was anyone, anyone, he could call to get him out of here, but there was no one so instead he decided to waste his call, and punch in a number he'd had memorized for years, for a landline all the way in Moloka'i.  
“Hello?” Answered a man on the other end- it wasn't so late yet in Hawai’i, only 8pm.  
“Can I speak to Nicole?” Kaleo asked, and listened to the muffled sounds of the phone being passed.  
“Nicky here, who's this?”  
“It's Malia.” A dead name.  
Nicole dropped the phone and scrambled to pick it up again, hissing away from the receiver, “It's Malia,” and then into it, frantically, like she was hearing a ghost, “Malia, where are you? Are you okay?”  
So now she cared about him, once he'd been missing for eight months.  
Did she remember all the fights they'd had? All the names she'd called him? Had she forgotten how she dropped him every year, like rotten fish, at the start of the summer? Because he hadn't.  
And this might be the last time he ever spoke to her.  
“No, I'm dead,” he said, deadpan, rage simmering deep in his stomach.  
It was almost true, in his mind.  
“What-”  
“You killed me. It's your fault.”  
It wasn't her fault he left. Not hers alone, at least. But he wanted someone to feel as awful as he did. He wanted to make her cry.  
“What do you mean? Where are you?” Her voice was starting to crack now.  
“Don't pretend that you care.”  
“But I-”  
“You were a bitch and I was an alien.”  
That was the thing she used to call him, alien. Because his eyes were too low on his face, what an alien, or short a few chromosomes, not that he felt like remembering that one.  
She stuttered and failed to reply, so he kept going.  
“I was a stick because my arms were too skinny, and a dyke because I was scared of boys, and stupid because I fell behind in class, and never enough of a girl for you, and you killed me!”  
She killed him. She killed him. It felt more true now than it had before, now he was saying it, now he remembered the sound of her laughter.  
“What kind of a friend is that? You asshole.”  
He thought he heard a sob, and it didn’t sound as good as he thought it would.  
“I’m sorry,” Nicky said, “Malia, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”  
She sounded like a child.  
She was a child, like him.  
And he couldn’t find his anger anymore, so he let her cry.  
“I should have been nicer, I should have talked to you more, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, please tell me you’re okay!”  
But he couldn’t, so he didn’t.  
And he heard a commotion on her end, and women's voices, before the phone was passed hastily to another and his mother cried, “Malia, you’re alive!” Just in time for him to hang up.  
He did not want to speak to her, not now and not ever.  
He sighed, and eyed the door.  
But still he was being watched, like a stray dog that might run at any moment, he could feel their eyes on his back, so instead he resigned himself, and returned to the desk.  
“Is your aunt coming?” The conductor asked.  
“Yes,” Kaleo said.  
“Good.” He brought an awkward hand to Kaleo’s shoulder. “No more fare-dodging, okay, kid?”  
“Okay.”  
The man gave him a pat and left for the train again, waving goodbye as he went.  
The woman watched him from the desk.  
“What’s your name, then?” Kaleo asked.  
“Debbie,” she told him. She was white, like the conductor had been, and looked to be maybe forty years old, and tired.  
He sat himself on one of the benches and didn’t bother to pursue further conversation.  
And the pain was back.  
Alright, Winona, it is way past your bedtime, he thought in the direction of his belly, too self-conscious to talk out-loud now that someone would hear him.  
“Girl or boy?” Debbie asked, very suddenly.  
“I don’t know.”  
Even if he could afford an ultrasound it wouldn’t have been something worth knowing. Doctors can be wrong in such predictions; he was living proof.  
“Well how much time have you got left?”  
“Couple weeks.”  
“Wow. Was it planned?”  
This lady knew no boundaries.  
“No.”  
“Oh, is Dad still in the picture, then?”  
“Yeah.” Yeah, sure.  
Koa was a nation away but he was Dad too, right? Kaleo the dad. Kaleo the seventeen-year-old living dead dad.  
“That’s lucky. My sons father completely walked out on me when I got pregnant. But that was probably for the best; he wouldn’t have been a good parent anyway. Are you planning on breastfeeding?”  
“I don’t know.”  
The idea of seeing his own chest like that everyday, and more importantly of other people seeing it, kind of made him sick, but he didn’t like formula either. Maybe there was a little bit of luck to be found in the fact he would be dead before he needed to make the choice.  
“Well there’s lots of benefits to breastfeeding, I would strongly recommend it. Mothers have been using it to bond with their babies for thousands of years. And it’s very healthy, much healthier than bottle-feeding. We evolved to do this, you know? Your body is made to get in tune with your baby and give it exactly the nutrients it needs. And it’s good for the mother’s health too, it-”  
He counted the bricks in the wall across the room and stopped listening.  
Hush, Winona.  
He wondered if Mom blamed herself yet, all the way back home.  
He wondered if anyone cared to tell his dad that he’d called.  
He wondered if Nicky was still crying.  
Oh.  
“Can I go to the bathroom?” He asked as nonchalantly as he could.  
“Uh,” she stumbled at the interruption of her lecture. “Yes, of course. I guess you’ve been needing to go a lot more often than you’re used to lately, huh?”  
She laughed like they were friends, and he ignored it, already pushing himself up from the chair and making his way in the direction of the sign.  
Through the door- Women’s, sure- and into a stall, he dropped his pants and sat and looked down.  
Wet.  
What the fuck.  
And it was still coming, like a creek trickling out of him, like Winona weeping.  
In movies, water breaks in a gush between the legs, white water river cascading down a cliff.  
Reality is often not so theatrical. He knew this, he knew, he had read it again and again, in books and online, holed up in public libraries hoping knowledge could dispel the fear.  
But still, still, still he was not ready for this.  
He needed time. That was it. He needed more time, a few days, at least, not now, not yet.  
Tears stung his eyes as his breath quickened in his chest.  
Not yet, not yet, not yet; He wasn’t ready to die.  
But Debbie was outside, and he couldn’t risk a hospital.  
Keep yourself together, boy. Keep yourself in check.  
Okay.  
Deep breath.  
In.  
Out.  
In.  
Out.  
In.  
He waited for the water to slow, and cleaned himself up as best he could.  
He pulled his sweatpants back up.  
He washed his hands and face in the sink.  
He stared at himself for a moment in the mirror, and wondered if it would be the last time he saw his own face.  
It looked tired, he thought. And ugly as ever.  
“Winona, I’m sorry you’ll have to look like me,” he mumbled, and he really was.  
A baby deserved so much better, even more than just prettier genes. Winona deserved a parent that was ready to have them. Someone older, and nicer, with money and a place to live. Someone who was excited to meet their baby, with a nursery prepared, and a birth plan mapped out, ultrasounds printed out on the fridge and a calendar counting down. There they might have a future, and a childhood. They might have their own bed one day, and watch cartoons on TV, go to school, make friends, be happy.  
Instead, all Winona had was a dad who was sorry, and who could only hope that someone would find them who would do everything he couldn’t. And that wasn’t fair.  
He wiped more tears away, and when he took his hands from his face he saw a lizard on the counter.  
A gecko, actually.  
He hadn’t seen a single gecko since leaving Hawai’i, but here it was, watching him through unblinking eyes. And as he stared back a strange feeling washed over him from his head to his toes, the kind one might feel tasting a food they had loved in childhood, or upon return to an ancestral home.  
So he recalled something his grandfather once said, the white one, with laughter and condescension of his late native wife, “she thought she'd be a lizard when she died.”  
How funny. Silly Islanders and their silly beliefs.  
And the gecko smiled, if geckos could smile, and then he blinked and it was gone, just as another contraction began.  
He steeled himself, and left the bathroom.  
“Everything alright, hon? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”  
“No, I’m fine,” he assured her, half-hearted, as he sat down once more. “Just tired.”  
“Oh, well, it’s late. You can take a nap if you need to; I’ll keep a lookout for your auntie.”  
He nodded, and moved his backpack up into a makeshift pillow, his hoodie into a blanket to hide beneath.  
Maybe he had been too harsh on the white lady. She was trying her best to be kind, maybe she just didn’t learn boundaries as a child.  
But going easy on people was a slippery slope.  
He closed his eyes and tried to sleep through the pain, but everytime it stopped it came back too fast to drift away, and everytime it came back it was worse than the last, so after some minutes, or maybe some hours, his focus became pretending, and doing his best not to scream.  
And Winona pushed and pulled and dragged waves through his body, crying impatient, tugging on his spine until his face went hot and his breath came ragged as he choked it all down.  
Not now, not yet.  
And this didn’t seem right. He didn’t think labor was meant to move this fast. He’d read it was supposed to take hours, that the pains started thirty minutes apart, but then again he was also supposed to have three more weeks. What had the books had to say about impatient babies?  
He heard the door open and heavy boots walk inside, but he wasn't in any state of mind to consider how strange that was in the middle of the night.  
“Hon, is this your aunt?”  
He opened his eyes, prepared to tell her no, but she spoke before he could, this woman who had just arrived.  
“Kaleo,” she said, “I'm so glad to see you.”  
And the gecko watched him from the desk beside her.  
He didn't know this woman. He was sure he didn’t. But she knew his name, his real name, and she looked brown, which was comforting, and besides he didn’t have much to lose, so he nodded to Debbie at the desk, and picked up his bag and his jacket to meet her.  
He fell down when he tried to stand as another wave came over him.  
“Do you need me to help you?” The strange woman asked, rushing forward with arms outstretched.  
“Yes.” Please.  
Her hands were strong, on his back and his side, and she lifted him to his feet with ease, bringing his arm securely around her shoulder.  
“What’s wrong?” Debbie asked.  
“I-” He winced, and cut himself off.  
“It looks like this baby is coming now, huh, kid?” The woman said instead.  
He nodded.  
Winona wasn’t waiting.  
“Should I call an ambulance?” Debbie cried, picking up the phone. “The Medical Center isn’t too far, they should be fast.”  
“No, thank you, though,” the woman said as she slung Kaleo’s bag onto her free elbow, “I can take us; we’ll be alright.”  
“You’re sure?”  
“I’m sure. Thank you for everything.”  
Debbie nodded, and watched them as they made their way through the door and out of her sight.  
“Wh-who are you?” Kaleo asked once the door closed behind them, into the crisp night air.  
“I’m called Mamselabika,” the woman told him, in a deeper voice now, more natural that the sugar she’d carried inside. “I’m here to take you home.”  
Home? Where?  
She led him to a black pickup truck, and opened the passenger door.  
“Wait, how did you find me? How did you know my name?”  
It wasn’t the first time a stranger had surprised him, but if he was about to get into a car with her he wanted to know.  
“A lizard sent me,” she said. “She told me you needed help.”  
Alright.  
It was crazy, absolutely ridiculous, in fact. But alright.  
He let himself be helped inside, and she shut the door behind him.  
She tossed his bag into the back seat and climbed into the driver’s side before starting the car.  
“How’s a boy like you end up all alone in a place like this, anyway? We don’t get many Hawaiians out here.”  
Boy. So she knew that, too.  
“That’s a long story.”  
They pulled out of the parking lot and onto the street.  
“Is it, now? And how does it start?”  
They turned a corner.  
“Depends on how you, uh, look at it.”  
They took a ramp, around and around onto the interstate.  
“How do you look at it?”  
He considered, and considered some more.  
Did the story start last August when he ran away, or at the beginning of the summer, when he met Koa? Or when Dad moved away ten years before? Or when Grandma died, leaving Mom to fall into a cycle of abuse? Or when Grandma married that old racist in the first place, back in 1961? Or was the story even longer, a century old, starting when American business overthrew Queen Liliuokalani and stole Hawai’i for itself?  
“It’s okay if you don’t know,” Mamselabika said. “You can tell me the shorter version. If you feel like telling at all.”  
“No I’ll tell you," and he took a deep breath, ready to recite the story he'd told countless fellow runways. "My friends didn’t like me, my mom said she loved me but hated everything about me, my dad didn’t know me at all, and my life wasn’t mine. If I had to pretend to be the girl they thought I was one more year I was going to explode, so I waited to visit my dad in California, and I ran. And that’s it.”  
“And how does the baby fit into all this?”  
“The baby-” Another contraction stopped him dead, his body bearing down without permission.  
“We should really be timing these,” Mamselabika mumbled.  
“Is it- is it normal for this to happen so fast?”  
“When did it start?”  
He checked the clock on the dash and tried to remember through the pain. “A couple hours ago? It started small, I wasn’t thinking about it.”  
“And how close do you think you are now?”  
“I think Winona won’t wait much longer,” he said, “I think I can feel- I can feel it pushing me, like it thinks I’m too slow- I-”  
Mamselabika hushed him, bringing a hand to his forehead to wipe the sweat there.  
“If the baby’s coming then the baby’s coming,” she said. “It will be okay.”  
Okay.  
Okay.  
He kept his breathing steady, and listened for a moment to the radio, the background noise becoming the only noise.  
It was a ‘70s channel; he thought he recognized Elton John.  
The pain eased.  
They crossed a long bridge.  
“Better?” Mamselabika asked.  
“For now.”  
She shrugged. “So you wanna tell me where the baby came from?”  
He watched her face as she drove and wondered what to say before settling on, “From a boy named Koa, who loved me.”  
“Well that’s a good start.”  
“Yeah.”  
“And does he know he’s a father?”  
“He couldn’t. I didn’t even know until Arizona. And there’s no way to contact him from the mainland.”  
“No way at all?”  
“No way at all.”  
He wished there was; There was no one else he missed talking to more. In fact, there was no one else he missed talking to at all.  
ABBA now. He liked ABBA.  
“I like ABBA” he said.  
“My friends are obsessed with them,” she replied, and laughed. “They saw them in concert once in ‘79 and haven’t stopped talking about it since.”  
Another contraction came, and he announced it with a sharp gasp.  
“Two minutes,” she counted.  
Two minutes?  
“You know, I don’t think I want to have a baby,” he said.  
He never had, he never asked for this. And how horrible it was, that he had finally found someone who saw him and the universe wanted to punish him for loving them?  
“I know, kid, I’m sorry.”  
And everyone kept calling him that; kid. After everything he’d been through, how could be still be a kid?  
“Where are we going, anyway?” He asked.  
“Home,” she said, “my home. It’s a little town down east, it’s quiet, you might like it. You don’t have to stay there, but I’ll make sure you’re taken care of as long as you do.”  
Well that seemed too good to be true.  
“Why would you do that?”  
What did she get out of it?  
“It’s my job, Kaleo. I take care of people. I find the people who need to be found. And I can’t get everyone, but I’m good at what I do, and I’m glad that I’m doing it. Otherwise I wouldn’t have met you, right?”  
“I’m not very interesting,” he said, and she laughed.  
“Of course you are.” Like it was obvious.  
Pregnancy didn’t make up for a personality.  
Donna Summer came on.  
Summer.  
It had been Summer when he met Koa, in the sand and the surf of stifled-hot Moloka'i.  
It was Spring today, but Spring on the mainland did not mean what it meant back home. Here, the season of blooming flowers was cast in rain, and grey skies. And he missed Summer.  
Another contraction, overlapping the last, and chills ran through his skin.  
“I feel sick,” he whined, “I don’t want to do this!”  
“I know, I know, I know.” Her voice was soothing like no other, like a blanket in the chill of Winter.  
They were thoroughly out of Portland now, forest and farms whipping past the window against the nighttime sky, and buildings becoming rare, and further between.  
“How much farther?” He asked.  
“Don't worry about it,” she said, “we’ll make it, and you’ll be okay.”  
“Okay.”  
More came, wave after wave that racked his body.  
He didn’t believe her; he was going to die.  
“Can I scream?”  
“You can scream,” she said, “I can take it.”  
He screamed, and he screamed, and he screamed, for the pain, and for the fear, and for the months of loneliness, the years of abuse, and for every broken piece rattling around in his hollow head.  
And then he stopped, and he breathed.  
And it was fine.  
This was fine.  
He was going to have a baby.  
The next one that came left no room for the last to leave, they ran into each other like watercolors, and he swore he could feel Winona slipping down, he could feel his muscles push without him.  
“It's happening,” he said, “I can feel it's head, it's happening.” And the words came far more frightened than he had expected.  
“Okay.” She sighed and stayed calm. “That's okay, Kaleo, it will be okay. If you need to take your pants off I won't look.”  
“I think I do.”  
“Then do.”  
He fumbled at the tie for a moment before he finally got it undone, and pulled the sweatpants out from under himself by force alone- just enough to not be in the way.  
And he could feel it with his hand, the top of a scalp, a tuft of wet hair, a new human being entering the world, and he wanted to cry.  
“Take the blanket in the glove compartment,” Mamselabika said.  
“It'll get gross,” he replied, and ignored the strangeness of keeping a blanket in a glove compartment.  
“It's only a thing.”  
He nodded and leaned forward to take it, just as Winona's head fell further.  
“I guess I'm supposed to push, right?” He asked now, bringing the blanket down the catch them.  
“Yes,” she said with certainty. “But don't tire yourself; it will happen.”  
And she was right- it happened.  
Once the head slipped it's way out, the rest came quickly, and Kaleo saw it; shoulders, arms, torso, legs, feet, until finally he held in his hands a complete, wheezing baby. The most beautiful baby he'd ever seen.  
And he was sobbing, and light-headed.  
“Aloha kakahiaka,” he whispered. Good morning.  
Winona looked up at him through brown, brown eyes and wailed.  
“Can they breathe?” He asked Mamselabika.  
“If they're crying, they're breathing.”  
“You're breathing!” He tried to exclaim, though his voice came weak, and brought the blanket up to warm them both, for he was cold now. He was far too cold.  
And that looked like a lot of blood running down his legs.  
Without taking her gaze from the road, Mamselabika brought a shaking hand under the blanket to his belly and pressed up.  
“How much farther?” He asked for the second time, breathless.  
“We’re almost there. You'll be okay.” But she didn't sound sure.  
“I’m sorry for bleeding in your car.”  
It was too much, it pooled around his feet.  
“That’s okay. Worse things have happened in here.”  
Worse things have happened.  
Worse things have happened, Winona Kealoha.  
The truck bounced as they passed the threshold onto a covered wooden bridge, onto the edge of Spinner's Valley, and to the sound of Winona’s cries he let his eyes fall closed.


	2. 2004

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is a lot shorter than the first one- most of them will probably be closer to this length from here on out.

On Kealoha’s first birthday, her Foster Grandma lounged peaceful on a wooden lawn chair in the backyard, sleeping soundly with her arms around the baby.   
Winona watched her as she dozed, and watched the trees, and listened to the sounds of the nature around her- she was not tired.   
And the Whip-poor-will called “Ke-aloha, Ke-aloha, Ke-aloha!”   
On a whim, as all of a baby’s decisions are made, she rolled from Mama Nina’s embrace and onto the ground below, letting the grass soften her fall.   
She lay here for a moment to catch her breath, and then slowly, steadily, she hoisted herself up, to sit and then stand, swaying unstable on her fat little legs.   
“Ke-aloha, Ke-aloha, Ke-aloha!”   
With one step, and then another, she made her way to the tree, a poplar standing tall, and listened there to the bird as it sang.   
Sometimes her daddy sang to her.  
Sometimes he held her close and bounced her all around and sang about birds and rainbows and things she didn’t understand.   
She decided she wanted her daddy.  
Away from the tree she turned, and shuffled back the way she came, past Mama Nina and her snores and to the back door, open wide to let the breeze in.   
She climbed up the step onto the tile inside, and stood up once again, proud of what she’d achieved.   
“Hey, Winona,” Moises said, spying her from the kitchen.   
She didn’t answer, but she waddled to meet him, holding onto the leg of his pants to steady herself.   
“Do you need something, mija?” He bent to pick her up but stopped, chuckling, when she recoiled out of reach. “That’s alright, I’ll leave you down there.”  
She turned around and wandered away into the living room.  
She still wanted her daddy.   
Up the stairs she crawled, one by one, crossing mountains and cliffs, stopping only when she heard the front door open behind her.  
“Hey, Winona,” Amanda said, shutting the door behind her and sliding the shoes off her feet.   
She jogged up the stairs and met Winona where she’d stopped.   
“You need help?” She asked, and before Winona could respond she swept her up into the air.  
Winona tried to wriggle away to no avail, until finally Amanda set her down again at the top of the stairs, giving her one last pat on her bewildered head before slipping away into her bedroom on the corner.   
Humph.   
Winona climbed up once more to her feet to continue her search down the hall.  
“Hey, Winona,” Hedley said, running off the other way.  
“Hey, Winona,” Delphine said, leaving the bathroom as she passed.   
And off to the right at the end of the hall she came to a door just slightly ajar, which she pushed, and tumbled past.  
“Hey, Winona,” Kaleo said, and smiled, as she brought herself back up.   
Daddy was busy trying to study for class, but he supposed he had time for Winona.  
“Come here,” he said, and she came, stumbling, to the edge of the bed where he sat.  
She watched him through her big brown eyes, and he looked back, and wanted to cry.   
Everyday she looked more like Koa.   
“Come on, Nona,” he said, “Climb on up, you can do it.”  
She could, of course, she could prove it. She reached out to grab the sheets, brought one leg up, and with a gentle touch he rolled her the rest of the way, good job!   
She lay on the sheets and stared up in his direction.  
He loved her.  
He loved her.  
He was hardly enough of a parent for her, but he loved her like sin.  
And he loved her brown skin, and he loved her round eyes, and he loved her wild curls, splayed out around her head, and her little nose in the middle of her face. And it scared him so much that he had made her. That she would not exist if not for his mistakes.  
“What do you need, Nona?”   
She reached her hands out above her and stared at them, and did not answer.   
“Kealoha?”   
She waved her hands at the name, her name, that no one called her but her father and the birds, but she still said nothing.  
But that was okay. What did he expect anyway? She hadn't spoken a word yet, why would it change now?   
"I want to know how you feel.   
"I want to know, won’t you please, please tell me so, tell me so, tell me so?"  
She laughed as he began to sing, and crawled up onto his lap, safe in the cradle of his criss-crossed legs, resting her fat little hands on his belly like she knew the same thing he knew, that his body still belonged to her.  
The past year had been kinder to him than he ever prepared for, and still it had been a beast to overcome.  
So it had gone, Mamselabika brought him home, and doctors kept him alive without consent, squeezing down on his body, filling him up with someone else’s blood.   
So, the foster home welcomed them, and they were given a room of their own in the corner of the house, of this Victorian mansion surrounded by strangers- he should have been grateful.   
So, it was weeks before he knew how to look at his own baby.   
Or maybe he still didn’t know how.   
Maybe he would never know.  
After all, how could he ever be expected to live with what he’d done to her? How he had forced her into this world alone? How he had failed in every way to be a father to her? And when would the sight of her stop reminding him of everything else that had come with her?   
And she was one year old today, already growing up too fast, and he was still not better yet.   
Oh, Winona, did she know? Her father had not been himself in a year.   
Her father had never been himself, not once in his life.   
Tears welled up in his eyes, and he wrapped himself around her as he broke down to sobs, even as she squirmed, and whined, and pushed him away.  
“Hey, Winona,” Nina said, letting herself into the room, “I was wondering where you ran off to.”   
She took him gently by the wrist and tugged until he opened up the cave of his body enough for Winona to crawl her way out.   
She put a hand on each of their heads and ran her fingers through their hair.   
Black and brown. Straight and curly.   
“Should we leave you alone?” She asked of Kaleo, and he didn’t respond, so she helped Winona down from the bed and guided her out of the room by her hand.   
But she wanted her Daddy. Why did no one ever let her stay with Daddy?  
She cried and screamed all down the hall, all down the stairs, and Kaleo buried his face into the covers and rejected her.   
Once he had thrown himself down a flight of concrete stairs to be rid of her.   
Once it was only selfish fear that had kept him from a steeper ledge.   
She deserved better than that. She needed a parent like Nina, not like him.   
And his books were forgotten on the other end of the bed, study materials for a high school class he would surely never pass. A degree he would never get. A life that would never belong to him.   
He squeezed his eyes shut and willed the Earth to swallow him up, but to no avail.   
Nothing to do but to live, how awful.  
There was a light knocking on the door, and he looked up to see a boy watching him from the hall, holding a half-eaten Italian sandwich in his hands.  
“Hey, Glenn.”  
“Hey, Lou.” He wiped the tears and snot from his face with his shirt. “You can come in.”   
From the moment they’d met, Lou had been Kaleo’s favorite person in town. It had been too long now, since they’d seen each other, but Lou and his sister had promised they’d be back for Winona’s birthday, and evidently they’d made good on it.   
He sat on the edge of the bed next to Kaleo and offered him what was left of the sandwich.   
“Nina won’t like that you brought food upstairs,” Kaleo said.   
“She doesn’t have to know.”   
Kaleo took it, and began to eat.   
He had been eating a lot lately. More than he ever did before Winona was born, at least. And now if the usual remnants of pregnancy weren’t enough, his thighs had grown fat enough to touch when he stood.   
He wasn’t sure if he’d ever hated looking at himself as much as he did now.   
“I’m supposed to call my mom today,” he said, apropos of nothing.   
“Who said that?”  
“Me.” It had been almost two years. “I owe her that much.”  
“You don’t owe her anything.”   
He shrugged.   
It didn't feel like that.   
It felt like he owed her everything, in fact. It felt like he was cheating her by not running home now, even if he couldn't stand to be near her.  
“How's school?” He asked to change the subject.   
"School is school is school is school."  
Lou went to college in Portland, had left for it so soon it seemed after Kaleo first arrived. The first year was nearly finished now, in a few more, too many more, he would be a real veterinarian, fully qualified to put cones on people's dogs and get shat on by horses. But he was excited, so Kaleo didn't dare try to spoil his fun.   
"What about you?" Lou asked, "how is it being stuck with all the babies?"  
"Horrible."   
And this was true. A grade behind his peers and he could still barely manage, what an idiot.   
And this on top of everything was almost enough to make him want to run away again, but now he'd done it once he knew it wouldn't get him anywhere. There wasn't a better place for him than here- how depressing.  
Lou wrapped an arm around his shoulders and pulled him into a hug, tight and secure.  
"It won't be too much longer," he said, "you'll be done before you know it."  
Kaleo didn't buy it, but he leaned into the comfort of the embrace, into the softness of Lou's body, and looked up at him.  
If he was being honest, Lou was exactly his type.   
If he was being honest, he had wanted to kiss his big, smiling mouth since the moment he first laid eyes on it, but such thoughts reminded him of Koa, and of pregnancy, and besides he had never been the kind to make the first move, so he held it in, and spoke nothing- something he had grown used to in his eighteen years.  
A creature of inaction, that's what he was.   
But that wasn't true, he had acted before; he had acted majorly, and torn his own life to pieces, how could he wipe himself of that blame so easily?  
So it would sit, and weigh on him, everything, everything, until his shoulders sagged and his back buckled, and all his wounds reopened again and again, bleeding to the floor and through the carpet and rising up around his ankles, an ocean as vast as the one he'd left behind.   
Nina called up the stairs and summoned everyone down; the cake was ready, and Mamselabika was here.   
Kaleo offered his neglected sandwich back, but Lou didn’t want it so he wrapped it up in it’s paper again and left it on his desk for the ants to take.   
And now was the time to celebrate, not to mourn. It was his daughter’s first birthday, afterall, Kaleo the dad.   
He followed Lou and everyone down the stairs, Delphine tripping at the bottom, barely looking up from her book, and Amanda, sporting a hickey from her boyfriend everyone hated. To the backyard, as a family, to see Winona in her high-chair, and Moises putting a novelty candle, shaped like a big number “one,” into a freshly iced tres leches cake.   
It was funny to see the lengths they went, this foster family, to keep up the facade of normalcy. Nothing here was normal, but Winona had a hat on her head in the shape of a cone with pink polka-dots, and homemade cake and sandwiches for her party.   
Everyone was playing house and Kaleo didn’t know the rules.   
But he would try.   
For her, he didn't have a choice.

**Author's Note:**

> Please don't forget to leave a comment!


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